Some Mothers Do Have Them

This afternoon (July 2005)(Thursday & the beginning of my weekend), the wind didn’t look to exciting for a long drive into the desert, so went across to my nearby 6 km narrow dirty beach at Hamriyah. Normally on Thursdays, there is nobody on the beach especially now as the temps are in the mid 40’s (degrees C that is). I had already knocked off about 25 kms blatting up & down when I noticed a 4 X 4 had pulled up to within about 30 feet of the water’s edge. I slowed down & waved at the the family that had emerged from the car. They waved back and I thought what a nice family. I passed dropped my kite back into the power zone & sped off.
I ran up to the end of the beach, turned around & headed back. This means I had covered about about 8 kms on the return & saw the family bathing/paddling in the sea. They saw me coming and suddenly the kid about 8 years old decides he wants to be a traffic cop & stop me. He ran right in front of me with his arms out. I had anticipated that something could happen & had so slowed down from my 50 kph to a slow walking speed. The Father by this time seeing me coming along followed his son from the sea & balled at his him for deliberately standing in the way.

Because I had slowed down quite considerably, there was no way that I could have hit the boy but the Father’s yelling had been quite effective. As I was almost stopped, I waved and thanked the Father then carried on. i.e. No damage done and nobody upset.

I discussed the incident with my Mrs who said it was understandable as the boy had probably never seen a kite-buggier before.

Now I’ve done some stupid things in my life but have never deliberately stood in front of anything that was charging at me even when I was a kid. If I had been a charging elephant that he’d probably not seen before either, then he would have been scraped up from the elephant’s footprint like a large flat pizza & elephants would have been banned from the beach.

Tomorrow I’m going to the desert; can’t stand all this overcrowding on the beach.

Sand-Yeti